Saturday, 13 August 2011

Attribution fail

This bugs me. The Sydney Morning Herald ran a big story about the £7.5 billion house that never was, mentioning the golden superyacht Stuart Hughes claimed to have customised, but failed to properly credit the magazine that got the quotes that exposed the boat story as fake in the first place - Motor Boat & Yachting.

MBY does eventually get a mention (right down the bottom), but the paper says the sales manager of Baia Yachts was speaking to some website called Born Rich when he revealed the sham. No he wasn't. A look at the Born Rich story quickly reveals that they picked up the story from us and The Star, whose story is a cut and paste of ours.

The Sydney Morning Herald is a massive newspaper, getting lots of web traffic. MBY could have done with those referrals. It's a proper street fight out there trying to secure advertising at the moment, so anything that raises the magazine's profile or portrays us in a good light is gold dust.

Two mouse clicks is all it would have taken to find the source of the quotes.